The City Cyber Cell has discovered a direct link between Indian scamsters and cyber crooks from China in cases where Gujarati businessmen and professionals have been cheated of large sums of money.
A massive money laundering racket in which money earned by the scamsters was transferred to offshore accounts in Hong Kong and Shanghai in China is also being probed. The amount of money transferred in the form of cryptocurrency is reportedly huge.
Earlier, MICA president Shailendra Mehta was duped of Rs 1.15 crore by Moin Ingaria and Mustafa Neviwal, the mastermind behind the racket. In another incident, a retired employee of Torrent Power Shrenik Vaishnav, 58, was duped of Rs 40 lakh by the crooks. In a third case, the victim was Mineshkumar Engineer who runs a testing and certification business. He was cheated of Rs 2.1 crore.
Modus operandi
In most of the cases, the crooks posed as customs and CBI officials or officers from other top agencies of India. The latest victim was a Surat-based businessman Dakshesh Parekh, 58, who was cheated of Rs 23.3 lakh. In this case, the local police on Wednesday came to Ahmedabad to take custody of Neviwala and Ingaria.
While Ingaria was nabbed earlier, Neviwala tried to flee to Shanghai but a Look Out Circular (LOC) issued by the Gujarat Police across airports led to his arrest four days ago.
According to cybercrime officials, the criminals impersonated an employee of FedEx and then threatened the victims by stating that illegal items were found in parcels sent under the victims’ names. They then spoke to the victims posing as cybercrime, customs and CBI officials to extort money. The fraudsters are targeting wealthy Gujarati businessmen and professionals, said the sources.
Skype chats
Chats between Ingaria and his Chinese associates have been found indicating that the Chinese through cyberspace gathered information about wealthy Gujarati businessmen and passed it on to Ingaria and Neviwala. The chats were on Skype and after every chat, the Skype ID was deleted.
The officials said that on the instructions of Chinese crooks, Ingaria and Neviwala would hire criminals who posed as employees of Fedex and officials of law enforcement agencies. The mobile phones of both Ingaria and Neviwala have been sent for forensic examination to identify the Skype ID.
Sources from the cyber cell said that so far they have found a trail of Rs 20 crore that was transferred to offshore accounts in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the form of cryptocurrency. The figure is expected to go up as the scam unravels. Goa and Hyderabad cops have also been informed about the scam as some of the associates of the scamsters are based there.
Officials of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) will also be examining the details unearthed during the investigation as it seems to be a massive money laundering scam.
